SG Strobist, or Singapore Strobist, is a blog on photography and for strobists, esp. in Singapore. Strobists use off-camera flashes to create studio effects and better lighting for photography, indoors or outdoors.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Nikon Creative Lighting System (CLS)

Nikon Creative Lighting System (CLS) allows a photographer to control remote flashes wirelessly via infra-red signals. CLS also allows the photographer to centrally control the settings of each group of flashes from the commander.

The following are cameras that have the built-in commander - D70/s, D80, D90, D200, D300, D700. The D50, D40/x and D60 does not have the commander mode built into the camera. Nikon flashes SB-800 and SB-900 also have the commander built into the flash. Oh... the pro range of Nikons (e.g. D3, D3x) also do not have a built-in commander because it does not have a pop-up flash to send the pre-flash signals. In anycase, if you can afford the pro range of cameras, what's a SU-800 to you? The SU-800 is a device that is built specifically to be the commander.

For a camera with the built-in commander mode, it is via the pop-up flash that the infra-red signals are sent to the remote flashes. However, the pre-flash that sends out these signals are often captured as a light source, and Nikon made the SG-3IR to block the light but still allow the IR communication to happen.

There are some pros and cons to the CLS.

Pros:- Once you have the commander (esp. for those in-built with the camera), you can control your CLS flashes remotely.- You do not need to buy additional devices to remotely trigger your CLS flashes.- You are able to use TTL with remote CLS flashes.

Cons:- Line of sight between the commander and the remote CLS flashes is necessary.- In outdoors environment, esp. under strong lighting, the communication between the commander and the remote flashes would be compromised.

The current line up of CLS enabled flashes are: SB-600, SB-800, SB900.